Supercar, Oologah Style

Give a kid a Dart and 22 years, and strange things start to happen

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

When a 15-year-old in 1987 goes out and buys a Dart, you know he's not a normal kid. Such a shame, too, because he started out so well.
There's no doubt that Wayne Smothers was on the car path from early on, but remember: This guy was born in the Seventies, and by the time he reached high school, that didn't mean Mopars. It meant IROCs and 5.0 Mustangs. Blame his dad, as so many of us do for so many things. His dad the tinkerer, his dad the entrepreneur, his dad and his Oologah, Oklahoma, transmission shop.
When he was 12, Wayne started working in that shop, a single bay tucked behind another shop, "So small that if you had a long car, like a Cadillac, you couldn't walk around the car with the doors closed." Wayne was soon the driveshaft guy, and at 14 started pulling transmissions, doing R&R after school. But he was still in ninth grade, doing normal ninth-grade things, like building Mopar models. "I was 15, I was getting into cars," he said. "I remember my dad telling me street-race stories from back when he was a kid. He had a '63 Plymouth Savoy with a 383 four-speed out of a '69 Road Runner... I wanted a Super Bee or a Road Runner really, really bad."
It turned out Dad still had some buddies from back then, and one of them, Mike French, was still in Dad's old Kentucky stomping grounds, buying and selling cars. And he had a running, driving 1969 Road Runner that would make a solid project car. So in June of '87, they drove to Kentucky. (Rocking out to Whitesnake all the way, we presume.)
Well, round about that time, ol' Mike sold that car--but he knew where a 383, four-speed '68 GTS Dart was for sale. "I had no idea what a GTS Dart was and I really didn't care, because all I knew was that Darts were grandma cars--but since we traveled all that way, I figured we'd go ahead and check it out," said Wayne.
It very nearly was a grandma car, too, because they found it literally half a mile from Wayne's grandma's house. "But when I saw it, I thought, 'This is pretty cool. This is a smaller, lighter car than a Road Runner, and it has the same engine. I like this thing!'"
It was in the hands of the original owner and was complete, running a 440 with manifolds. Wayne didn't mind, but it barely ran and had been smacked around some. For $1,000, it was worth it. They left a deposit and came back a month later, when they scraped up the rest.
"My momma had a heart attack," said Wayne. " 'You paid $1,000 for that? Are you insane?' She thought we were crazy." Wayne and his dad didn't have the scratch to get the car in shape, but what they did have was a transmission shop. They needed tires: Trade for transmission job. Engine machine work: transmission job. Seat upholstery: transmission job. Exhaust: transmission job. Paint: Four or five transmission jobs. Transmission job: transmission job. Wait, what? It was a four-speed--Dad only did automatics. "We low-bucked it!" Wayne said.
Things started to happen.
He sold the 440 out of the car and turned it back into a 383. He was driving it to high school, where it was basically ignored, but he soon made his first-ever pass down a drag strip, clocking 15.30 at 98 MPH.
"Driving that thing out of the hole, trying to learn how to drive it and granny shifting, aw, it was exciting," he said. "But gosh, I was hoping to go faster than that." He did have those special Mopar small bolt-circle Cragars and a Crane Fireball hydraulic cam, but the block was otherwise close to stock.
Wayne joined the Sunset Cruisers to hook up with people who could help him get the car built right. At the first club meeting he went to, in a room at the mall, a cute girl was selling raffle tickets. They talked, and Wayne realized he knew her dad, who owned a Belvedere. When the club had a cruise down to Oklahoma City a few weeks later, he called and asked to talk to Shea--did she want to come down to OKC in the Dart with him? They got married in 1995, and that's Shea's photo of the car launching at Tulsa Raceway Park.
When cold weather started sweeping down the plains, "I got the buzz to redo the car, to make it really super nice and make it faster." He had some bodywork done, but it was a cob job: A few months later, the painted body shell started to rust through. So Wayne had it re-done, but then high school ended and he went to work full-time doing R&R for his dad.
Then the NHRA came calling, and through a series of unlikely coincidences and connections, at age 19 he ended up being on the Roland Leong Hawaiian Punch Funny Car team, and later Leonard Hughes' Smokin' Joe's Racing, and others. Starting in 1992, Wayne would fly to Top Fuel races for the weekends (how he came to be a flying clutch specialist is another story), work for his dad during the week by day, and work for himself at night. He branched out into car covers and custom upholstery work, selling pieces and taking orders at the races. "I'd work at my dad's shop 8 to 5, eat dinner from 5 to 6, work from 6 to 10 or midnight either sewing or working on customer cars, every night, seven days a week," he recalled. During the 28 or so weeks of racing, he'd put in an additional 40 hours or more over the three-day race weekends.
"There wasn't much time to work on my own car, so it just sat and sat," Wayne said. Plus, he'd never been able to get engine machine work done to his satisfaction. "I was frustrated," he said. "I was just disheartened with it; I just parked it and messed with other stuff, to try and figure this crap out. I had nobody to show me. I'd ask for help... but looking back, they didn't know what they were talking about either. They were more lost than I was.
"You can take your car and have it painted, and you can see right away what kind of job they did. Well, your block--you can have it machined and it looks just as good as one a guy spent a lot of money on. You can't tell by looking at it."
But between Top Fuel and building cars, it would eventually come together for Wayne. "I paid for my education. I learned good, good, good lessons the hard way," he said.
In late 1992 and early 1993, Wayne built a 438-cubic-inch engine out of the 383 block with newly available stroker pistons. "It ran okay, 13.20s at 105, which I was happy with. But it didn't last, shoot, a month. I spun a rod bearing."
Once again, indifferent but undetectable work by someone else bit him. "I took it apart and fixed all that--it lasted about two weeks, then it blew a head gasket." It would not run again in the 20th century. "I had the car apart and the engine out of it a lot more in those years than I ever spent driving it."
At the end of 2002, Wayne quit the Top Fuel circuit. "My [oldest] son would get so sad whenever I'd go out of town that I just decided that I needed to be home more for him, plus I was covered up in muscle car work," he said. He told his dad he needed a few weeks to get some muscle car projects done. "After two weeks, I had another two weeks worth of work lined up," and never went back.
He finally went through the Dart again in time for the Mopar Nationals in 2004. After hauling it six hours up to Columbus, Ohio, he used up the clutch as soon as he got there, doing parking lot burnouts (with wife and kids on board). He changed it the next morning on the ramps of his trailer, X-pipe and all; after all, there were two more days of burnouts to do. This time, it ran for a month, because at Monster Mopar Madness in St. Louis in September, he bent an axle launching it and went into the wall.
Maybe he would have put it back together yet again, but shortly thereafter, a spray chrome plating sideline he'd been sinking cash into went south, badly. "I had to drop back and punt," he said. Business had to come first, years of rebuilding and retrenching.
It wasn't until last year that Wayne got going on the Dart again. When we called him up in May to ask if we could photograph it in June, he said no way--it hadn't gone beyond the paint. Wayne being Wayne, though, a week later he decided to get it together.
Step one: Finish the new engine. This time, he'd started with something a little beefier than a 383, a "cold weather," thick main web 1972 Dodge 400 block. He would have had it done last year, but "that's a sore, long, sorry subject." He went through three cranks from a well-known 440 specialist, rejecting the first for bad indexing, with throws too far off to grind; the second was nixed for main journals that were incorrectly machined, forcing him to grind the block so the counterweight wouldn't hit the casting.
Finally, Motion Machine found one they could work with, the indexed, balanced lightweight 4.25-inch stroke shaft giving Wayne 514 cubes with "oblong" [offset]-ground journals. Jim Lewis at Lewis Racing Engines did the rest of the bottom-end work, building the blueprinted block with cross-bolt Pro-Gram Engineering main caps. Ross forged aluminum pistons bump compression to 13.5:1.
Dwayne Porter's Porter Racing Heads did the solid-lifter top-end. Camshaft lift and duration are, as Wayne says, "a lot," but up top he got extra-creative. What looks like a dual-plane intake is really an aluminum dummy, fabbed up by Steve Stone of Radical Creations. What it covers is a Mopar M-1 single plane--and, best of all, it's capped off by a Holley Dominator. The body fools you just a bit, too, because the front fenders and bumper are fiberglass.
As Wayne started epic all-nighters to get it done for our June rendezvous, bad news hit: His Passon Performance 18-spline aluminum-case transmission was lost in the mail. He stuck in the original 23-spline that the car left the factory with, just to get it mobile for the photo shoot. The race box turned up about 10 days later. "The transmission has been Pro-shifted, but first gear is still synchronized so it's drivable," he said. After all, he drives it the 50 miles round trip to the strip.
Really, the Dart still wasn't quite done when we got our hands on it: You can see it's up on tiptoes--the right rear spring had too much arch, the front left was jacked up to compensate and it pulled like hell to the left. Before Wayne took it out to the drag strip a couple weeks later, he took about 1½ inches of arch out of the spring.
That first time out was just like all the others: One pass, then a problem, a fast leak from a nail in a front Moroso. But that was enough to say they were almost there, because he hit 11.12 seconds at 123.4 MPH.
The second time out, a couple weeks later? So much dust from the clutch that guys thought the car was on fire. By the time you read this, with a new adjustable McLeod sintered iron race clutch, Wayne thinks he'll hit 130 MPH. He'll also be pulling the engine again to go on the dyno stand--with enough tuning and tweaking, he'll land in the 600 to 620hp range.
If you added up the years, the heartache, the wrecks, the money, the time away from the family, you'd never say it was worth it. "I had a few times I thought about selling the thing, because it just sat so much," said Wayne. "In the meantime, I had four kids, started another business and lost my ass in that."
But talk about giving up, on anything, and Wayne just looks at you as if you're speaking Swedish. He can't give up; he can't quit on anything until it's either dead (chrome plating) or perfect (everything else). In the end, to know it's all been worthwhile, all you have to do is look at the car: It's the coolest Dart in the world.
OWNER'S VIEW
Basically, it comes down to what I believe these cars are all about, which is to have fun and make them at least run respectably (there are way too many that don't). And to do that, high compression and a custom-ground solid flat-tappet or roller cam really makes it a lot easier to make great power and still have a car that's considered drivable.
I'm not a fan of putting mini-van propellant into my hot rods. That's like building a rocket that doesn't run on rocket fuel. If you can't afford to buy good fuel for your muscle car, then you can't afford the car in the first place.--Wayne Smothers
PROS
+ 575-plus sleeper horsepower
+ Runs deep into the 11s
+ Streetable, if you're up to it
CONS
- Fat & skinnys make it a real handful
- Dart doesn't equal sexy
- Race gas only need apply
1968 Dodge Dart GTS SpecificationsENGINE
Type: 1972 Dodge 400 B-series, cast-iron
Cylinder heads: Bulldog ported alloy
Displacement: 514 cubic inches
Bore x Stroke: 4.375 x 4.25 inches
Compression ratio: 13.5:1
Horsepower @ RPM: 575 @ 6,300 (computed)
Torque @ RPM: 597-lbs.ft. @ 4,500
Main bearings: Five, cross-bolt main caps
Fuel system: Holley Dominator 1050 CFM four-barrel, M-1 single plane intake manifold, Radical dual-plane cover
Ignition system: 12-volt, electronic distributor, MSD 6AL analog ignition
Lubrication system: Full pressure, Melling pump
Exhaust system: Dual 2-1/2-inch iron manifolds, FlowMaster X-pipe, DynoMax Ultra-Flo mufflers
Original engine: Chrysler 383-cu.in. four-barrel
TRANSMISSION
Type: Passon Performance 18-spline four-speed manual, alloy case, McLeod 11-inch clutch
Ratios 1st: 2.65:1
2nd: 1.93:1
3rd: 1.39:1
4th: 1.00:1
DIFFERENTIAL
Type: Dana 60 housing with spool and Richmond gears
Ratio: 3.54:1
STEERING
Type: Manual recirculating ball
BRAKES
Type: Drum, hydraulic power assist
Front: 10 x 3 inch
Rear: 10 x 2 inch
CHASSIS & BODY
Construction: Steel unit body, fiberglass fenders and front bumper, frame connectors, welded roll cage
SUSPENSION
Front: Torsion bar, Calvert Racing 90/10 shocks
Rear: Live axle, leaf springs, QA-1 single adjustable shocks
WHEELS & TIRES
Front wheels: Centerline aluminum, 15 x 4.5 inches
Rear wheels: Five-lug steel, 15 x 8 inches
Front tires: Moroso 26-inch DS2
Rear tires: Hoosier Quick Time Pro drag radials, 27 x 10 inches
PERFORMANCE
1/4 mile ET: 11.12 seconds @ 123.4 MPH
Top speed: 155 MPH (est.)

This article originally appeared in the October, 2009 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.